


Feel the Light Shine

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Series: Tumblr Jukebox [2]
Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 01:52:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11094429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: "So what's next for you?" he asked. They were legally resurrected, it was true, but there was still an investigation to wait out and hearings to be held. All of them were functionally suspended for the time being, though by some stroke of luck nobody had started throwing around words like "disbanded" or "discharge" yet.Cougar lifted one shoulder in a shrug."No se," he admitted, knocking his knee against Jensen's. "Finding a place to stay, maybe. Somewhere more comfortable than Clay's couch."





	Feel the Light Shine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dixiethumbelina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dixiethumbelina/gifts).



> From a Tumblr request made by @dixiethumbelina!
> 
> Jam for this was "Shadow's Keeper" by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Bolivia wasn't so bad.

The booze was cheap and the women were an eclectic blend of movie star babes who barely afforded Jensen the time of day and ball-bustingly terrifying grannies who usually took a liking to Jensen's affable nature and provided him with all the lovingly wrapped homemade leftovers a growing boy could want. It wasn't home, not by a long shot, and he missed his sister, missed playing goalie for his niece on the weekends he wasn't on the job, missed watching her destroy the other kids her age at her meets, but it wasn't so bad. He'd managed to talk Cougar into renting a shit one-bedroom apartment with him instead of bouncing miserably between motels like some kind of tragic game of pinball the way that Clay and Roque were both doing, so that was something, at least.

Jensen mostly slept on the recycled futon out in the living room because all of his gear was there. It was a pretty pitiful set-up in comparison to what Jensen had gotten used to - parts scrounged together with the dregs of his paycheck that didn't go toward booze, or liberated from the occasional asshole who wasn't treating their hardware appropriately. She was an ugly little machine, Patsy, when all was said and done, most of her wiring exposed, and carefully situated near the window so that whatever of the heat she put off that Jensen's inelegant coolant system couldn't handle would siphon out into the perpetually sticky Bolivian air instead of creating a heat sink in their apartment.

Sometimes Cougar slept out there with him, silent and intense in that way he got whenever he was thinking about the kids, half a burnt-up teddy bear stuffed under one arm and a bottle of tequila in hand, leaning into Jensen's side and listening to him incorrectly narrate local telenovelas until he started to nod off into the blissfully empty slumber of the absolutely gourded.

It was a frequent enough occurrence that Jensen eventually stopped being weirded out by coming to with a mouthful of hair and the familiar scent of another man's cologne curling around him. It was sweaty business, sleeping on the futon, because there was no fan out here and the window AC unit had been conscripted to bring Patsy to life, but Cougar didn't seem to mind and Jensen wasn't going to make a big deal of it if he wasn't, even if the warm press of Cougar stretching all along his side, just a bare expanse of skin aside from his briefs, sometimes made his stomach dip and swoop in new and alarming ways.

On somewhat rarer occasions, Jensen would sleep in the bed with Cougar. His modus operandi for most of his life had been to repress any shit he wasn't ready to deal with and keep himself busy until that time-clock ran out, which wasn't a terrible coping method, as they went. Better than falling into whatever pit of mildly self-destructive hopelessness Clay was currently mired in, not that any of them had seen enough of him to make a real college try at digging him out of it, despite their best efforts. The problem was that the entire thing hinged on Jensen's ability to keep himself occupied, and there were occasional long stretches of hours here in Bolivia where there was nothing to do except drink, relax, and ruminate on all of your life's most miserable failings up to that point.

Jensen had made a few token efforts at packing his schedule too full to think about anything, but participating in the local nightlife was too much of a crapshoot - if he wasn't lucky enough to secure himself some company he would wind up miserable and panicked and surrounded by strangers, and besides, there was no reliable way to predict when he whiskey was going to tip him over into maudlin - and Cougar had put the kibosh on his working two jobs when Jensen had nearly fallen asleep and tumbled off the back of his moped on the way to the doll factory one day.

Instead, on the nights that Jensen could feel his chest getting tight, breath coming in bursts that were too shallow to do anything but make him dizzy, eyes stinging and rage caught in a hot knot at the back of his throat, he would get up and pace the length of the living room and the little kitchenette until his shuffling summoned Cougar's attention, and then Cougar would come and take his wrist in a surprisingly gentle grip and lead him to the bedroom, tugging him down and running his fingers through Jensen's hair while Jensen tried to keep his damp, hiccuping sobs to a minimum.

They never talked about it, aside from sharing the occasional heavy, determined look when Pooch or Roque, drunk and angry, commented on just what they planned to do with Max when they managed to dig him out of whatever slimy hole he was hiding in.

They didn't talk about a lot of things, he and Cougar, and though Jensen had been working on mustering his courage, suddenly there was Aisha, and then Max, and then Roque. Jensen might have been known for his chatter, but he understood that there was a time and a place and hauling Pooch around a shipyard because he had a neat bullet hole in either leg was hardly either of those things. There was no room for heartfelt confessions when an Amazonian warrior goddess was toting a rocket launcher around, and assuming that neither of them died horribly in this skirmish - which was looking more and more likely with every passing explosion - it would keep.

It kept until after they'd snuck Pooch into the hospital to be with his wife and their beautiful kid, until Aisha had relocated permanently to the states for a change of scenery, until Jensen was forcibly ejected from a Petunias game for making perfectly reasonable comments on the referee's many profound shortcomings in their profession and as a person.

He was sitting in the bed of his sister's truck when Cougar caught up with him, a couple of sodas and one of those giant ballpark pretzels in hand. He shoved the pretzel at Jensen and then hopped up onto the bed beside him, proffering a soda as he did.

"You didn't get any cheese," Jensen said, tearing a piece off of the pretzel and accepting the drink with a grateful nod.

"That yellow garbage?" Cougar muttered disdainfully, arching an eyebrow from underneath his hat. "No es queso real."

"Primadonna," Jensen replied, and couldn't help grinning when Cougar rolled his eyes. "How'd it look when you left?"

Cougar made a little motion at the pretzel and Jensen obligingly shifted it over so that he could rip a piece away.

"Petunias were up," Cougar provided. "Ref gave the other team a penalty after you left."

Jensen kicked his feet out and threw his hands up in the air, letting out a whooping laugh. "Suck on that!" he announced joyously to the collection of abandoned cars. "Vindication!"

Cougar didn't say anything, but when Jensen turned to look his mouth was tilted in that soft smirk that Jensen had only ever seen directed at him. His belly swooped and dipped, and Jensen ducked his head, took another bite of pretzel.

"So what's next for you?" he asked. They were legally resurrected, it was true, but there was still an investigation to wait out and hearings to be held. All of them were functionally suspended for the time being, though by some stroke of luck nobody had started throwing around words like "disbanded" or "discharge" yet.

Cougar lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

"No se," he admitted, knocking his knee against Jensen's. "Finding a place to stay, maybe. Somewhere more comfortable than Clay's couch."

Jensen snorted. He'd seen Clay's disaster of a bachelor pad, they all had. The sofa was a relic from the nineteen-seventies and it had to be playing hell on Cougar's back.

"Not heading back to the homeland?" he pressed, curious. Cougar shook his head.

"Nobody waiting for me back there," he said easily. There was a melancholy to it, of course, but it was an old, old wound, long knit over.

"I'd offer to let you crash at my spot but the lease ran out while we were presumed dead." Jensen shook his head. "What is the world coming to when a guy goes through some kind of hero-movie bullshit and then has to come home to a U-Store-It unit and a foldout sofa-bed in his sister's basement?"

Cougar huffed a tiny breath of a laugh.

"Better than staying with your boss and his lover." He took a thoughtful bite out of the piece of pretzel he still had in hand. "The walls are thin and Clay is very...enthusiastic."

Jensen barked a laugh, leaning back with the force of it and curling a palm over Cougar's shoulder to keep himself upright.

"Oh dude. _Dude_. Why would you tell me that? Now I'm gonna be thinking about Clay's orgasm noises all day."

Cougar responded with an unpleasant series of low grunts, which kicked Jensen into a fit of laughter that made his stomach ache and his eyes water. When he'd finally managed to subdue himself and catch his breath, Jensen tilted his soda back and forth, listening to the ice slosh, and said, "We could split a place, maybe. Since you're staying."

Cougar arched a doubtful eyebrow at him and Jensen clapped the hand with the pretzel in it dramatically to his chest, sending a little spray of salt up from the grease soaked paper wrapping.

"Wow," Jensen said. "That cuts me deep, Cougs. I was a perfectly pleasant exile roomie."

"You never wore pants."

"It was hot!" Jensen defended. "Nobody's fully dressed in ninety degree heat unless they're legally obligated and the law stops at the front door, man."

"It was distracting," Cougar parried, leaning in to take another piece of pretzel and staying there, close enough that he and Jensen were pressed together all along one side. It had been a few weeks since they'd last loitered quite so intimately in one another's space, and Jensen was totally unsurprised at the way his heartbeat kicked up a little faster, face heating.

"Well," he said, with an ease he didn't quite feel, "I make no promises about levels of public nudity. Can't pin me down, Cougs, I gotta be free to let my hair fly in the wind."

"Not a very good compromise, amigo," Cougar replied breezily.

"I'll do dinners," Jensen supplied after a moment's thought. Having a brain that rarely stopped had always been something more of a curse than a blessing, but it had afforded Jensen a hodgepodge of strange skills, and thanks to a few stressful years in his teens when sleep had been thin on the ground but cookbooks abundant, he was no slouch in the kitchen and Cougar knew it. It was another one of those things they didn't talk about, like the teddy bear, or the way Cougar despised fireworks, or the ancient little prayerbook wrapped in a faded silk scarf that he carried in one of the pockets of his tac-vest. The way their gazes sometimes lingered too long or the low, lyrical Spanish Cougar had taken to murmuring against the back of Jensen's neck when they were spooned together on the futon or together in the dingy bedroom and both politely pretending that Jensen was still fast asleep.

"No computers in the living room," Cougar replied. "No puedo vivir con Patsy otrá vez."

"Three bedroom's going to run a little steep if we want downtown," Jensen said thoughtfully. "I mean, I'm betting we could manage it but I don't know what your budget is and - "

"Two."

"What?" Jensen blinked, train of thought derailed. "Two what?"

"Bedrooms," Cougar supplied, as though Jensen was being especially uncooperative.

"Oh. Uh, okay? I was just thinking we could use an office but I guess I could keep all my gear in my room. Might be kind of a squeeze but - "

Cougar cut him off again with a loud sigh and a rapid fire string of mumbled Spanish, the only part of which Jensen could accurately make out was 'guero tonto' because Cougar called him that all the time. He didn't know what it meant, exactly, beyond that Cougar thought he was being an idiot but liked him anyway.

"Two bedrooms," Cougar said, peering intently at Jensen from beneath the brim of his hat. "One can be an office."

"I don't - "

Cougar sighed again and reached over to curl his palm over top of Jensen's thigh.

"Jen," he said, low and serious. " _Jake_. Think."

Jensen's heart thumped hard against his ribs, face so hot he felt sunburned as he considered the implications of Cougar's statements. Either he was setting Jensen up to sleep in the living room again on a more permanent basis or - oh. _Oh_.

"Oh," he breathed, and Cougar squeezed his thigh, gave it an affectionate pat, and then took his hand back.

In the end the Petunias won, and everyone went back to Holly's place for cake and pizza, which had the added benefit of affording Jensen the opportunity to invite Cougar to stay over. Bolivia hadn't been so bad, he considered, burying his hands in Cougar's hair and moaning into the slick heat of his mouth once everyone had gone home and his family had retired for the evening, but this was better.

 


End file.
